Unidirectional perfect absorber

This study proposes a unidirectional perfect absorber (UPA), which we realized with a two-arm Aharonov-Bohm interferometer, that consists of a dissipative resonator side-coupled to a uniform resonator array. The UPA has reflection-less full absorption on one direction, and reflectionless full transmission on the other, with an appropriate magnetic flux and coupling, detuning, and loss of the side-coupled resonator. The magnetic flux controls the transmission, the left transmission is larger for magnetic flux less than one-half flux quantum; and the right transmission is larger for magnetic flux between one-half and one flux quantum. Besides, a perfect absorber (PA) can be realized based on the UPA, in which light waves from both sides, with arbitrary superposition of the ampli- tude and phase, are perfectly absorbed. The UPA is expected to be useful in the design of novel optical devices.